I’m sorry your favorite show doesn’t suck

You know what hurts people more than telling them their favorite show sucks? Telling them their favorite show is simply ok. They react as if I threw their kittens in a wood chipper.

Perhaps I’m being insensitive since it’s morally impossible for someone of my refined taste and unbridled honesty to praise mediocrity. But isn’t mediocre taste better than bad taste? Mediocrity means there’s something good about it. Seriously. I’m not saying that just to be nice. Likewise, when I say a show is bad, I’m not joking around. It really does suck, completely and thoroughly. If you like it, you should be ashamed of yourself, and my reviews should agonize you.

Well, when somebody goes and says, “HEY GUYS CHRISTIANITY SUCKS EVERY SINGLE CHRISTIAN IN THE EARTH SHOULD DIE!”, nobody takes him seriously. Even if you’re a Christian, you wouldn’t care, by subconsciously treating his comment as inferior to your own thoughts due to its blatant bigotry.

On the other hand, if somebody said, “HEY GUYS CHRISTIANITY IS GOOD AT KEEPING PEOPLE GOOD PEOPLE BUT I THINK THE BUDDHIST TREATMENT OF GOD MAKES MORE SENSE!”, people will take him seriously. If you’re a Christian, you can’t subconsciously treat his comment as inferior to your own thoughts because, capitalism (hoho) aside, there’s really nothing wrong with his comment. People who can’t refute his comment would then run home crying to their mommies; while people who can refute his comment will refute his comment, but it’s not like you’re also taking note of all the people who do reply reasonably.

Wait,you actually do see ‘favorite’ shows recommended to you? O_O
How about I recommend some too?
And yeah,I do agree with many of your reviews BUT there have been many shows which you’ve said bad but I have found it good….so your goods are really good whereas not all your bads are necessarily bads 😛

You should definitely give Ashita no Joe a go…there’s no reason why you shouldn’t
1)It’s a 70s and 80s anime,which guarantees it to be awesome (you said so yourself)
2)It features boxing (Another thing which is of your tastes)
The only thing which is damn inconvenient is that the fansubbers are really slow (you have to tolerate an episode a month)
Awaiting your reply

Well, I guess terrible is easier to make entertaining through hyperbole than mediocre. Which I suppose softens the blow somehow? I don’t know, I don’t claim to know about people who think that saying something is okay should warrant the electric chair.

It’s like how people would rather have other people react to them negatively than to be indifferent towards their existence. When you give their favorite shows a bad review it means that it at the very least created some emotion within you (even if its just hate or displeasure). When you say the show is merely mediocre its the same kind of indifference which makes an individual feel like they don’t exist. Saying something is just okay is like saying that it barely exists.

There’s another factor you have to consider here, bud. That factor being YOU. People come to your site because of the way you respond to things, you’re a pretty extreme reactionary when it comes to things you don’t like, and you derive that from your idol, Maddox. When someone submits their “favorite” show, they could in fact be submitting a show that they intend on seeing be placed on the chopping block, whether or not they even like it at all. Instead, what they were hoping for was another Maddox style rant about everything that could be considered “bad” about the show, sometimes even affirming what they themselves believed to be bad in the show. Frankly, it’s this style of writing that keeps me coming back to this site as well, as you probably won’t see me around very many other anime blogs, because I favor a succinct and blunt approach to the “blog” concept, with as little “today I did X” or “today my cat did something so funny” sort of posts as can be avoided. You seem to avoid bringing your own life story into the fold unless it’s relevant, and that plus the black background and plain white font hearkens back to the era of Maddox in a time before “blogs” and people posting about their cats that is very refreshing. People who submit their favorite shows to you are probably responding to this as well, whether they know it or not. In fact, their only real hope is for a sense of interaction with you, the author, so that they can say that they ‘participated’ in the creation of your latest post in some manner, be it derivative or not.

My top commenter from 2008 convinced me to watch Ghost in the Shell. I watched it, thought it was good but not great, and never felt the inspiration to write a review post. Said commenter passively-aggressively expressed his frustration about it in a few comments, and I haven’t heard from him since. Maybe things would’ve turned out the same way if I’d reviewed it. Maybe not. So your participation theory may have legs (though perhaps not as many as a Tachikoma).

It’s because in my experience, people who say that an anime is average but not great, tend to sound smugly confident about how they found the golden mean between fanboyism and the hatedom, as if that would make them more right than everyone else.

When you claim that you laughed through every minute of a comedy, people will just assume that you have a strange sense of humor to like it that much. When you say that you were bored out of your skull during a slice of life, they will understand that you don’t apreciate the slice-of-life atmosphere. But in either case, the “in my opinion” is already implicitly there, based on the fact that your opinion is so different from theirs, that they simply KNOW that you can’t be right. But if your opinion is only slightly different from theirs, they might feel like you trying to make an objective statement.

It’s especially noticeable when people feel that a supposedly “popular” (well-known) show is overrated, and they all go out of their way to sound unbiased about it, and confirm that it’s “good, but not as much as all those fans claim it to be”, until that phrase practically becames a meme, and the few people who actually like it are drowned in a hive-mind insisting on how average it is, and that only deluded fanboys would claim anything else.

I do occasionally call out anime for being overrated, but the gist of the argument is that the show is flawed, not really that it’s average. The reception tends to be more like “lol u 2 funneh” than “I’ll never read your blog again!”

[…] So we quit when we can’t handle having to juggle our lives and our hobbies, right? How more simple can the question get? Yet it’s hardly that simple. At which point do we drop our hobbies to focus on our lives? When we run out of time for blogging? It’s not like we don’t know anyone who blogs only once in a blue moon, yet remains alive and kicking on the ‘sphere. (I’m looking at you, Baka-Raptor.) […]

Hmm.. For one, I love your blog, I totally relate to most of the posts. I love Liar Game(watched the series and the movie – btw there’s a new one coming out this march), I hate Endless Eight etc..

So I’m not sure if I should recommend my top most favoritest fanboyest anime ever. Gintama. There, I hope you give it a try. I heard the anime is much much better than the manga because the humor translates better and i’ve never read the manga. I hope you give it a try and write a review for it and I think there’s a high chance you might enjoy it 🙂